Can Ellen Page save the female-fronted comic book movie?

If you’re a lady who is a fan of comic book movies, two words haunt your dreams: Catwoman and Elektra — two big-budget films that flopped at the box office and convinced studio execs that people won’t watch movies about female superheroes. Never mind that they bombed because the scripts sucked, and not because they were female-fronted. Vagina-dollars (the money women use to see movies about women) confuse the hell out of Hollywood. But maybe, just maybe, our savior Ellen Page is here to turn things around. Apparently the universally beloved A-lister is in talks to star in the film adaptation of Greg Rucka‘s long-running comic book series Queen & Country.

Photo: Jason LaVeris/Getty

I’ll give you a second to wrap your mindgrapes around the idea of a tag-team between the Eisner/GLAAD Award-winning guy who penned Batwoman: Elegyand Ellen Freaking Page. Here, read what Rachel Maddow wrote in the foreword of Elegy while you process:

I won’t lie to you: I would read anything Greg Rucka wrote. I would read Greg Rucka’s grocery lists. I would read Greg Rucka’s discarded edits. I would read a Greg Rucka forty-volume soft-hearted navel-gazer about characters I couldn’t care less about, if he was capable of writing such a thing, and if he did I’d probably read it out loud to my friends and exclaim and swear about how he made me care.

Queen & Country is a spy drama that centers around Tara Chace, a badass British SIS Agent who trots around the globe saving Great Britain from destruction on the regular. She’s smart, she’s fearless, and she is oh so damaged. Have you ever wondered what it would be like if Starbuck got hired to do James Bond’s job? It’s kind of like that.

Rucka said on Twitter that he’s keeping all the appropriate appendages crossed that Fox can work out a deal with Page, and Variety says the film “could do for Page what the Jason Bourne franchise did to lift Matt Damon‘s profile.” It could also do a helluva lot for the female comic book movie industry as a whole. Box Office success could mean sequels. The studio has seven years’ worth of Queen & Country comic books to work from. And it could also mean green lights for other lady-fronted comic book films, hopefully even superhero ones. (You know Joss Whedon wrote a Wonder Woman movie, right?) Basically, it’s what you’d call a win-win-win-win-win.

What do you think of the news that Ellen Page is in talks to play Tara Chace?